TV historian Dr Suzannah Lipscombe

Picture pinched from the full article at The Daily Mail, she is to TV history as Dr Helen Czersky is to TV science:Or Becky Mantin to weather forecasting, Jessie J to pop music or Sally Bercow to being a politician's wife, for that matter.

She might be broad of beam, but just look at that elbow/waist ratio...

Pinched from today's Evening Standard:

"More than half of British women's legs 'too short'"

From the BBC:

More than half of British women have legs that are shorter than the recommended attractive size, experts say.

Researchers from the charity Nuffield Health say short legged women risk an increased chance of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, infertility and cancer. The researchers found the average inside leg measurement for women is 80cm (31.49in), compared with the idealised length of 84.9cm (33.43in)...

Dr Deniszczyc, professional head of physicians and diagnostics at Nuffield Health, said: "Short legs can contribute to significant health issues, such as breast cancer and infertility. Thankfully, these can be minimised by wearing high heeled shoes, high waisted trousers or skirts, and swimsuits with high arches over the leg rather than a bikini."

Nuffield Health examined data from more than 30,000 women and found 57% had legs shorter than the aesthetic optimum. It said women in the north of England have the longest legs, with an average inside leg of 87cm, compared to 81.9cm in London.

Ideas for blog posts

Here are a few things which I've scribbled down on bits of paper over the past few days which I vaguely intended to 'blog about at the time but never really got round to it. So as an aide memoire for the future:

1. The normally prudish Sun newspaper showed a Page Three girl who was wearing invisible underwear as advertised by Bar Refaeli.

2. Porn shops in Westminster won a refund/reduction of hefty licensing fees from the council, because they contravened EU Directive 2006/123/EC, which seems like quite a sensible directive on the face of it. All of this raises a lot of interesting questions (economic, legal, sovereignty etc). How do we square Article 12 with licensing of taxi drivers, for example?

3. Supposed right-wing Tory John Redwood musing about how nice it would be if we could go back to the lower tax rates we had when the Chancellor was... Gordon Brown (top rate income tax 10% lower, National Insurance 2% lower, VAT was 2.5% lower etc).

4. The UK is not absolutely useless at everything: shock Britain exports more vehicles than it imports for first time since 1976

5. It appears that they are going to make people criminally liable for death and injuries caused by their dogs, something which I have long advocated.

6. Tory government is close to achieving its pre-election pledge of getting construction of new housing in England down to less than 100,000 a year for the second year running. With the rain stopping play during April and all the Olympic and Jubilee ructions, I'm sure they'll get it down to five figures for the next year. Hoorah! The Hallowed Green Belt is Preserved For Future Generations! But not to build homes on, obviously - just think, instead of having a house with a rental value of £10,000 a year, we could be growing £100's worth of potatoes or something.

7. Queues at Heathrow. FFS. When you think how much human effort and ingenuity it takes to run global air travel: the aeroplanes, the technology, the staffing rotas, coping with the weather, air traffic control, difficult passengers, getting people's luggage on the right aeroplane, killing as few passengers as possible, guarding against terrorist attacks etc, it is amazing how well it works, really. And the UK government can't even organise a few dozen people to sit in booths, open passports, check the face, hold it face down on a scanner and mutter "Enjoy your stay" while chewing gum.

8. I explained recently why the building society funding model, where a company's assets are matched £ for £ with customer/owner deposits instead of shares is a vastly superior way of running a business than having share capital. So instead of a shareholder being paid dividends at the whim of directors; investing in a company by buying shares from an existing shareholder and realising his investment by selling his shares to a third party; a depositor invests directly in the business and withdraws money from the business.

It occurred to me today that this model is also used by Unit Trusts: a UT's net assets are always funded £ for £ by unit holders' funds: you invest in a UT by paying in money, which is invested on your behalf (in shares in other companies, but that is not important), all the income and gains of the UT are credited pro rata to unit holders as they go along, and if you want your money back, you withdraw it from the UT itself, and to the extent that withdrawals are not matched with new subscriptions, the UT just sells some of the underlying assets. So the model does work in real life, it's nothing new or unusual.

9. While looking for something else, I stumbled across a couple of instances of Austin Mitchell MP saying sensible things about Council Tax, e.g. here and here. And about London.

10. UK banks not completely dishonourable: shock RBS repays £163bn emergency loans

11. BobE emailed me this fine piece of Home-Owner-Ist drivel from guess which paper:

Regardless of where you are on the income scale, nobody could ever call your decision to buy a house irresponsible – whatever happens, you need somewhere to live, and swingeing rents usually represent far worse value. For low-earning households to have avoided mortgage debts, they would have had to actively decide to stick with renting; that is, to pay the same, for a worse property that they'd never have any equity in, just on the off-chance that, as a result of a possible downturn, they might be dragged down by the debt. What a bizarre thing to expect of people, when you're preaching a can-do, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, aspirational Tory attitude.

12. Jorge emailed to ask whether I thought Iceland should adopt the Candian dollar, I can't say I have a view on that one way or another.

13. Finally, is it just me or do Natalia Vodianova's legs look completely out of scale (in a bad way) in this photo from today's Evening Standard?

Last night on the telly (1)

I saw various bits and pieces which are worth mentioning or which reminded me about other things I'd been meaning to mention:

1. On the earlier news (on Channel 4), they showed footage of Nick Clegg coming out of his house, jumping into a big black ugly hatchback limousine type car, then cutting to the same car sweeping into the car park at the Houses of Parliament. For some reason they pixellated out the number plate, despite we all know where he lives and works, what he looks like and so on. What extra protection this pixellation is supposed to afford him is unclear to me.

Later on (on the BBC News channel) they showed a similar montage, however the car registration plate was not pixellated, and I can hereby inform you that the number he was using that day was PK60 PXG. But he's the Deputy PM, no doubt he can organise a new number at the drop of a hat so I doubt this will compromise his security too badly.

2. He then waffled on about the Tories wanting to position the UK in the mid-Atlantic. Geographically, this is nonsense of course, and politically it is a false comparison, just because you don't like the EU does not mean that you want the UK to become the 51st state of the USA either. Twat.

3. They covered the Frozen Planet fakery. I never bother watching any of his programmes, the footage might be impressive but the explanations provided are largely hokum. David Attenborough is, frankly, either a liar or an idiot - he recently claimed that towns are swallowing up hedge rows, for example. He went on to defend his fakery, and despite having worked in television all his life, clearly never read that part about wearing long socks so that when you're sitting down and cross your legs, the viewers are spared the sight of a few inches of pale naked flesh twixt sock and trouser leg. 'Astronaut socks', they are sometimes called.

4. The weather girl on ITV News was Becky Mantin. You can't see her legs when she's on telly, but going by her elbow line/waist relationship (various pictures here), they must be awesomely long.

5. Lenny Henry appeared in an advert for some hotel chain. His Wiki page describes him as "actor, writer, comedian and occasional television presenter". He clearly can't act, I've no idea what he's ever written and yes, he is occasionally on the telly. But what really puzzles me is the reference to him as a "comedian". To the best of my knowledge, he has never said anything in the slightest bit interesting or intelligent, let alone or funny. Can anybody actually remember ever smiling, giggling, laughing etc at any of his 'jokes' over the past three decades?

Closer scrutiny of elbow/waist line entirely unnecessary

From The Evening Standard:

Elbow-Ism (2)

Having spent the last couple of days staring intently at women's elbows/waistlines, I announce this week's winner to be Sarah Jessica Parker (see poster for her latest film).The narrowest part of her waist is three or four inches above her elbow line so she probably has incredibly long legs.

Ah... she does.

Elbow-ism

A Guest posted a very lucid comment over at Lady Short Legs:

Another one of the things I'd like to share with you is how I can tell if a person's torso is longer and has short legs (without having to calculate the measurements) -- check out the waist and elbows when they are standing upright.

If the tiniest part of the waist falls ABOVE where the folds of the elbows are, then they are short torso-long legs. However, if their waist fall BELOW the level where the folds of their elbows are, then they are of long torso-short legs. Check out Angelina's and Claire Danes' waist to elbow fold level in these photos:

Short torso-long legs: http://cache2.allpostersimages.com/p/LRG/14/1433/ZICR000Z/posters/angelina-jolie.jpg. Imagine if she just left her arm hanging, the tiniest of her waist would still be higher than her elbow's fold.

Long torso-short legs:
http://cdn.buzznet.com/media-cdn/jj1/headlines/2009/02/claire-danes-2009-film-independents-spirit-awards.jpg. Notice the tiniest part of her waist and where the fold of her elbow's level is.

Okay, that's all that I wanted to share with you guys. I thought it might be easier to measure based on my theory :) Enjoy!

I hope you won't let this tip go to waste.

Dogsbody

Apparently, the technical term used for people whose legs are only approx. one-third of their full height is 'dogsbody'.

Picture from The Daily Mail:

Is it just me or does Pippa Middleton have very short legs?

Either that or her torso is abnormally long. Picture taken from here.